Ted Rheingold's web journal from 2005-2008

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SXSW ’06 – Social Geeking

I’m in the middle of a social geeks dream week. It’s been four years in the making but this year I managed to attend eTech and SXSW back to back.

At eTech the intriguing question about Dogster, Inc. regarded our revenue streams and profitability, at SXSW the questions are all about the community we’ve cultivated and what we hope to do next. These topics are the ying and yang of the goals for our little pet site that could, and it’s great getting the advice and feedback from so many interested people.

All in all, SXSW is much more my kind of events. eTech is for corporate employees that want to learn what’s going on (which is important) and SXSW is for the designers, coders, do-ers, imagineers and entrepreneurs that are making a lot of it happen. eTech costs $900, SXSW $175. Both have 4 days of programming.

Yesterday I led a panel attended by over 500 people (!) entitled DIY, Now More Than Ever. It went really well, teased out a lot of significant experiences as it was quite a pleasure getting to cull the knowledge of others who have have made so much happen on zero or nano budgets. Matt Mullenweg of the wildly popular WordPress, Michael Hudack of the video blogger nerdvana Blip.tv, Lynda Keeler of the simply engaging Delight Networks and Gina Trapani of the widely read Lifehacker.com join me discussing the high and lows, ease and hardships of developing projects on the side with impossibly small resources. From the amount of people that came up afterwards or spoke with me later I’m really glad I put so much time and effort into making it happen.

Molly Golightly also spoke on a panel yesterday on “Roll Your Own Conference and discussed her experiences helping make WebZine happen since 1998. Not surprisingly she stole the show ;> Tara wished she had been the moderator. FYI if you want to roll your own conference go to the BarCamp.org website. Why A BarCamper was invited to the panel, I’ll have no idea.